Google's visualizations of public data

With Google's public data explorer, you can create custom visualizations of publicly available data, to easily view trends.

This can be used to create some pretty fascinating Visualizations. In fact, this was the graph I used for assignment 1. What makes it great is it shows a whole lot of data, while maintaining legibility. The use of the "Time" slider at the bottom shows in real time how the data points change in relation to one another. One can also witness important historical events, and their effect on this data, such as in 1993 when Rwanda's life expectancy dropped to 26 years of age. The comparison of different regions using color is another powerful tool that points out life expectancy trends within regions. All charts are fully customizable, both on variables used, as well as data points observed. I never cease to be amazed by the stuff Google comes up with.